This exhibition celebrates the surprising variety and rich talents of the finest furniture makers currently residing in Middle and East Tennessee.

Contemporary Focus is a new KMA series that serves as a vital means of recognizing, supporting and documenting the development of contemporary art in East Tennessee. Each year, we will feature three emerging artists who work in new and experimental ways.

Anton Vidokle is one of many artists who recognize the educational potential of art, but his productions usually do not manifest themselves in the form of traditional art objects. In the place of sculpture or painting, Vidokle creates work in the shape of social forms familiar to us – such as libraries, schools, and public conversations.

Interested in the links between art, science, and technology through the ages, New York artist Devorah Sperber deconstructs familiar images to address the way the brain processes visual information versus the way we think we see. “As a visual artist,” she says, “I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic than the act of seeing—how the human brain makes sense of the visual world.”

The Tennessee Art Education Association is pleased to announce it's partnership with the Knoxville Museum of Art to present the Fourth Annual East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition. This exhibition features artwork created by East Tennessee middle and high school students. The competition offers students the opportunity to display their talents and be honored for their accomplishments in a professional art museum environment. The student art exhibition provides an excellent competitive arena for young artists.

Knoxville Colorline is a site-specific light installation by San Antonio-based artist Bill FitzGibbons. The work consists of programmed LED lights placed along the KMA's north facade that transforms the building into a shifting canvas of colored light every night through the end of 2010.

Visual artist Anne Wilson has been at the forefront of artwork connecting conceptualism and handiwork, activism and aesthetics, investigating new possibilities for what has been called "relational aesthetics."

Wilson's practice extends the relational in terms of labor, collaboration, and identity construction, blending pedagogy with aesthetic production. Her work has been exhibited extensively including exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and as part of the 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Knoxville-based artists Jason S. Brown and Elizabeth Scofield have designed and fabricated an outdoor sculpture installation in the KMA’s North Garden that combines botanical forms created with synthetic nylon fabric.

Uncertain Terrain features a broad selection of works—paintings, photographs, drawings and video—by artists whose chief inspiration stems from the surrounding landscape, whether rural or urban, perceived or imagined. The exhibition examines the many ways artists reference the external environment in constructing scenes marked by instability, ambiguity, deception, or fragmentation.

Vision, Language, and Influence brings together for the first time the work of three photographers of the American South over a 50-year period.

Shifting Structures is a site-specific project conceived by Brooklyn-based artist Jane South, who has become known internationally for her elaborate sculptural drawings. Using little more than a scalpel and colored inks, she transforms fragile folded paper into structures that appear industrially reinforced.

The art we call “contemporary” represents the leading edge of where artists are working today. Contemporary art is experimental, provocative, exciting. It is an investigation into new ideas that change the way art is made.